1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications and, more particularly, to handling location determinations to reduce subscriber-experienced latency while conversing network resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent telecommunications advances and a proliferation of mobile telephony subscribers have ushered in an age where subscribers rely upon their mobile telephones as a mobile communication link to a vast array of available services. Subscribers expect to remain in contact with others using the telephone services of their mobile telephones and typically desire their mobile devices to provide them with messaging services, e-mail services, data services. Web browsing services, entertainment services, media streaming services, and the like. These services generally rely upon IP-based networking, which can be provided by an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) infrastructure.
Providing mobile telephony services is a competitive industry which forces service providers to maximize expensive infrastructure resources in order to provide services to subscriber populations at competitive rates. Further, these services must be maintained at a relatively high level of Quality of Service (QoS), otherwise subscribers will either not utilize revenue-generating services and/or will defect to competing providers who offer better QoS for similar services at similar rates. Generally, service providers are challenged by repurposing existing infrastructure resources from legacy implementations (POTS or PSTN architecture) to more modern ones (IMS-based architecture). Further, service providers are challenged with selectively upgrading equipment and deploying new services in a scalable fashion where QoS is maintained as a subscriber population grows.
Location dependent services are one growth area for subscription services. Such services consume substantial resources and consumer demand is increasing. It is anticipated that location services will become a multi-billion dollar revenue source for providers in the near future. A location-based service is one that at a platform level returns a base set of coordinates, which signify the geographical location of the subscribing device. Different programmatic actions are then taken based upon this geographic location. For example, a weather-based service can be invoked which provides local weather conditions to a subscriber based upon the subscriber's location. Location-based services can require course-grained positioning information (i.e., a general region in which the subscriber device is located) or fine-grained positioning information (i.e., mapping services). Different location-based services can also require updates at different rates, depending upon a service for which the positioning information is being used.
As presently implemented, location dependent services require significant resources to be expended and incur relatively long subscriber-experienced latencies. For example, location is often determined using a Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) technology that determines an approximate location of a mobile telephone within a service cell. Each time a service needs a mobile telephone position, a TDOA operation is performed and corresponding resources are expended. Further, a typical latency for the network position determining equipment (PDE) has an order of magnitude of over ten seconds and precise location queries can have a latency of up to twenty-five seconds. These latencies are unacceptably long for many services and automatically cause customer dissatisfaction for others.
Further, few service providers can dedicate sufficient infrastructure resources to support reasonable loads and throughputs for location-based service offerings. It should be appreciated that when location-based services are provided, subscribers expect these services to be available regardless of where in a network the subscriber is located. Accordingly, every network location, not just those cells in popular regions that often have more modern network equipment, needs to be capable of providing location-based services at a reasonable QoS. What is needed is a new scalable, resource efficient way to provide location-based services at a reasonable QoS level with lower subscriber-experienced latency.